‘Wayne knew everybody and everybody knew Wayne’

By Tom Ayres

Senior Staff Writer

Dapperly topped with one of his signature hats, often complemented by a linen jacket, dress shirt, bowtie, and sporty slacks, Wayne Thompson was a jaunty presence in his native Woodstock for decades.

“Wayne knew everybody and everybody knew Wayne,” Thompson’s longtime friend and theater collaborator Tom Beck said at the outset of a eulogy he offered at a chockfull memorial service at North Chapel on Nov. 17.

Painter, sculptor, photographer, actor, political activist, philosopher, raconteur, and friend to all, Wayne Thompson passed away at Mertens House in Woodstock on Oct. 28. A 1959 graduate of Woodstock Union High School, where he finished at the top of his class, Thompson was 83 years young when he died.

Wayne wore many hats, both literally and figuratively, as his obituary noted. He touched countless lives with his talent, humanity, gentle spirit, philosophical asides, and tenderly offered advice, often given over a toast with a cocktail at weekly gatherings at Bentley’s or the Public House or a casual breakfast at one of his favorite haunts, the Mon Vert Café in Woodstock Village.

Scores of mourners packed the fabled North Chapel for Wayne’s remembrance service on a joyous, memory-laden Sunday afternoon earlier this month. Eulogists spoke with reverence and abiding emotion about their longtime friend, while others added their musical talents to the memorial mix. Over the course of last weekend, some of Wayne’s most beloved friends and admirers expanded on the accolades they shared that Sunday, providing more insights into the life and times of a quiet, debonaire, thoughtful, self-effacing, and immensely kind man of enormous, if often unsung, artistic talent.

“I had a deep and immediate friendship with Wayne, based initially on our shared passion for art and design,” Woodstock-based landscape architect and visual artist Jack Rossi recalled. “Known or unbeknownst to Wayne, beyond our friendship, he was my spiritual teacher,” Rossi said. “He taught me to slow down and savor the moment. He once told me, ‘I don’t rush’ — exemplified by his casual daily stroll from Mellishwood to Mon Vert,” Rossi, who befriended Wayne about 15 years ago, continued. “Wayne was a bit of a philosophical Stoic. He understood there were things in life we have no control over, but with the things that we do have control over, we could change the world and make our community a little better. He was always in the here and now. You always felt attended to in his presence and I never met a better listener.”

Bill Stetson was a teenager when he and his family lived on River Street in Woodstock in the 1970s. Wayne and his former wife Barbara lived next door to the Stetsons and Bill and his older, wise neighbor nurtured what was to become an abiding friendship of some 60 years’ duration.

“He was a kind of big brother — a curious artist, a person with a twinkle, an ever-present smile, an ancient Raleigh bike with a basket full of stuff, an ancient and lovable ‘60s VW Bug, always carrying some antique camera that looked like it had survived World War II. He was someone everyone wanted to know,” Stetson recollected. “Our old brick house was a gathering place for my sister and her Rhode Island School of Design and New York friends from Vogue, Woodstock Country School hippie kids, our young farmer friends from west of town and more. It was a scene like you cannot imagine and Wayne loved it!”

Stetson headed off to Harvard in the mid-1970s and whenever he returned to Woodstock from Cambridge throughout his college days, his first phone call was always to Wayne. “He’d fix a gin-and-tonic and I’d walk across the driveway to catch up,” Stetson said. “Later, he lived up at the Cox District property that belonged to the Mertens family,” he continued. “He managed their properties, cut the fields, maintained the old Rolls Royce, and floated in the pond on his raft.”

Stetson, an ardent political and environmental activist who together with his wife, Jane, has been in the upper echelons of the Vermont and national Democratic Party leadership for five decades, also shared a passion for politics and community engagement with Wayne Thompson. “In 1976” — at the height of Democrat Jimmy Carter’s ascendancy to the White House — Stetson said, “Wayne and I put our heads together and said, ‘Why don’t we start a Democratic Party office in Woodstock?’ After all, there hadn’t been one in the last 100 years,” the longtime political activist added, chuckling, calling to mind Woodstock’s longtime allegiance to quintessential Vermont Gov. and U.S. Sen. George Aiken- style Yankee Republicanism. “What could go wrong, right? Peter Gratiot, a Republican good guy, owned 39 Central and suddenly we had our office,” Stetson quipped. “Wayne could create so much from nothing — discarded pencils, art from his walls, desks from dumpsters, typewriters. And then the day for our grand opening arrived in mid-‘76. I ran up the sidewalk and there was Pag — Chief Paglia, the former [Woodstock] police chief, entering the building. He said, ‘Wow, the whole town is here!’ But it was just four of us — me, Wayne, and my Republican parents. I asked Pag, ‘You’re a Democrat, right, being from Barre and all?’ And he said, ‘Nope, I just wanted to see what they looked like.’ Wayne loved that old Vermont humor.”

Stories of Wayne’s artistic acumen are legion. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1963, where he studied photography under Harry Callahan, one of the foremost American photographers of the 20th Century, who founded and chaired the RISD Photography Department in 1961 and taught there until his retirement in 1977. After his graduation from RISD, Thompson ventured to New York and Boston, where he built a celebrated portfolio as a graphic designer before returning to Woodstock with health challenges, primarily periodic seizures related to a traumatic brain injury he suffered from a youthful tumble down Quechee Gorge in his teens.

Much like Thompson and Rossi, Woodstock denizen Wendy Starr and Wayne first bonded in the mid-1980s and became fast friends over their shared interests in the arts, gardening, volunteer work, and community activism in Woodstock. “Once he was settled at Mellishwood [in his later years], I would see him strolling down Central Street towards home, having either been to the coffee shop or maybe a theater audition,” Starr remembered with affection. “He would ask, ‘Where have you been and where are you going?’ and I would laugh and say I was on my way to Sculpture Fest and ask if he wanted to come along. He would wave his hands joyously in the air and say, ‘Why of course!’” Starr and another of Thompson’s close friends, local real estate agent Tambrey Vutech, have spent the past several weeks rummaging through Thompson’s chock-full apartment at the Mellishwood senior living complex in Woodstock Village, uncovering a lifetime of paintings, sculptures, publications, memorabilia, and thousands of photographs that Thompson had taken over the years, dating all the way back to his student days at RISD. Starr and Vutech are working closely with Rossi to assemble a wealth of Thompson’s artistic creations that are being donated to the Artistree Community Arts Center in Pomfret, where an auction of Thompson’s work will benefit Artistree in the spring of next year. At Thompson’s behest, the auction is being organized in collaboration with Artistree Gallery Guru Azusa Mihara. Thompson, whose “cloud” paintings and stabile sculptures were known throughout New England, was an omnipresent exhibitor at Artistree and at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth over many years.

Not one to be limited solely to his pursuits in the artistic realm, Thompson also spent much of his life in Woodstock tackling roles in community theater. That’s how Tom Beck, then a bartender at the former Bentley’s in Woodstock Village and a celebrated theater director and actor, first got to know Thompson about 35 years ago.

“When I started acting with the New Woolhouse Players, friends told me I had to meet Wayne Thompson, who at the time was not living in Woodstock,” Beck offered, referencing Thompson’s periodic wanderings that took him as far afield as Rio de Janeiro and coastal California in midlife. “Finally, one day he showed up at Bentley’s where I was tending bar. Shortly after he returned to town, he was holding court there and charming all the ladies.”

Beck first directed Thompson in “The Odd Couple” in 1990. “A photo of him as Vinnie is on a wall in my apartment,” Beck enthused. “Wayne later told me that the apartment was the upstairs of an attached barn in the house where he lived as a kid.” Beck went on to direct Thompson in a wealth of roles, from one of the horses in Peter Schaffer’s Equus to the lead role in Steve

See WAYNE THOMPSON - Page 7D

“He was a Renaissance man: he tended a community garden [at Mellishwood], created small sculptures, and painted canvasses of clouds. My life has been enriched having Wayne Thompson as a part of it.”

— Tom Beck

Wayne Thompson would always toast his friends at many years of weekly gatherings at Upper Valley watering holes such as the Public House in Quechee, the former Bentley’s on Elm Street in the Village, and in more recent times over the past year, at the Ottauquechee Yacht Club in Woodstock’s East End.

Tom Beck Photo

A young Bill Stetson captured this photo of his honorary “Big Brother” and River Street neighbor Wayne Thompson atop his “ancient Raleigh bicycle” in 1972.

Bill Stetson Photo

Wayne Thompson was a staunch political activist and community servant throughout his adult life. Thompson and his friend Bill Stetson fostered a revitalization of the Democratic Party in Woodstock and Windsor County in the late 1970s.

Courtesy of the Wayne Thompson Estate

From Page 1D Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

“His seizures never stopped him from acting,” Beck remembered. “He had one during a rehearsal of Picasso. Mike Blackman (another Woodstock theater standout) said he had to stop a performance in the Little Theater when Wayne had one. They closed the curtain, waited a few minutes, and then reopened it and Wayne went right on with the show,” the awestruck Beck said. “He was always willing to help on any show I did. He used his graphic arts ability to design the program for Equus and many other shows. No part was too small for Wayne,” he continued. “Every role he played was memorable, whether he was the train conductor in The Music Man in Town Hall or Windy, the pilot of the Cotton Blossom in Show Boat at Chandler Music Hall. He had a remarkable eye, too. Whenever we saw a play together, he always noticed some small detail about a costume, set, or actor. He was a Renaissance man: he tended a community garden [at Mellishwood], created small sculptures, and painted canvasses of clouds. My life has been enriched having Wayne Thompson as a part of it,” Beck concluded.

Wayne was a longtime member of the North Universalist Chapel Society of Woodstock Village, where his life was celebrated with the Nov. 17 memorial service. North Chapel Office Administrator Joanne Boyle organized the remembrance ceremony together with Starr, Stetson, Vutech, Beck, and Rossi. “I talked about how Wayne introduced people to other people, and he made friends of friends,” Boyle said last weekend, citing remarks she offered at the Celebration of Life for Thompson. While assembling a wide range of memorabilia that was on display at the North Chapel gathering, Boyle received a phone call from an octogenarian woman named Johanna Lyman, who had gone to college with Wayne at RISD back in the late ‘50s.

“One day, Johanna called the church and said, ‘I just wanted to be sure Wayne’s church knew that he was sick,’” Boyle stated. “And, of course, there had been several of us who had been the ones that had gotten him to the hospital, but I told Johanna that I loved the fact that she called and we had a little chat. She said, ‘I went to RISD with him and he introduced me to my husband. I was there in Woodstock a month ago, visiting Wayne,’” Boyle reported. “Johanna was in the midst of relocating from Massachusetts to Florida to be nearer her son, so she couldn’t get up here for the memorial service, but she sent me a piece of art that she had drawn and it’s hanging on my wall now,” Boyle said. “I have it hanging on my wall here and now she and I are friends. It’s just another example of Wayne connecting people, nurturing friendship after friendship.”

It falls to the late artist, actor, philosopher, and community activist himself, as well as a pair of country songwriters and a singer, all quoted by eulogists at Thompson’s memorial service, to have the final words in this remembrance.

Bill Stetson said that his wife, Jane, was visiting Wayne at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center during his final days. She clutched Wayne’s hand in hers when the medical team at DHMC informed him that he was not going to recover from the illness that finally took his life. Wayne’s reaction, as Jane Stetson related it, was, “It’s been a good life, so let’s not get all worked up about it.”

Tambrey Vutech chose to read the prose poem “Gratitude” by contemporary poet David Whyte, in honor of her friend Wayne at the North Chapel gathering. “Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness,” Whyte wrote. “We sit at the table as part of every other person’s strange world while making our own world without will or effort. This is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets and fully beholds all other presences.”

Jack Rossi concluded his remarks about Wayne Thompson that November Sunday with the closing verse of “Three Wooden Crosses,” a song by country song crafters Kim Williams and Doug Johnson that was a chart-topper for Randy Travis 20 years ago: “It’s not what you take when you leave this world behind you, it’s what you leave behind when you go.”

Longtime friends fondly recall the late Wayne Thompson as a dapper fellow who loved to deck himself out in colorful garb and a sporting carnation. He was always wearing one of his ubiquitous, dashing chapeaux.

Courtesy of the Wayne Thompson Estate